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Editorial

Implausible denial

Ex-superintendent’s “I knew nothing” excuse wears thin

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Sunday August 24, 2014 6:54 AM

In the two years since
The Dispatch uncovered the huge data-rigging scheme in the Columbus City School district,
the mechanism of the scheme has been exposed, district principals and others have been fired or
otherwise disciplined and one top officer, former data czar Steve Tankovich, has been convicted of
a felony charge in connection with the scheme, with others likely to be charged.

Yet throughout it all, former Superintendent Gene Harris, on whose watch the cheating proceeded
smoothly and efficiently for years, has maintained that she knew nothing about it. That claim,
questionable from the start, has become more implausible with every new revelation.

The skepticism was crystallized last week in comments by Ohio Auditor Dave Yost regarding six
hours of testimony by Harris, who took the stand Aug. 8 in an administrative hearing for a former
principal who is contesting her firing.

Yost took special note of how Harris said she reacted when she learned that anonymous letters in
2004 had accused Tankovich of “cooking the books” on student attendance: She didn’t investigate,
but asked for advice — from Tankovich.

Asking the subject of an accusation what to do about the accusation was, in Yost’s words, “
incompetence at its highest degree,” adding, “It’s even worse than not doing anything at all.”

As it turned out, Tankovich suggested an investigation by the State Department of Education,
which reviewed and gave high marks to district attendance-record policies. It didn’t investigate
whether the district actually followed those policies. That non-investigation shielded the cheating
for years.

Harris’ testimony further outlined how little she investigated or inquired about what her
employees were busily doing with student records. She said she knew that Tankovich routinely
scheduled one-on-one meetings with principals at the end of each school year, just before data is
reported to the state.

She said she didn’t know what those meetings were about and didn’t ask. She never knew about
Tankovich’s rule that principals should identify students who had missed 10 days of school in a row
and mark them as withdrawn from school, even when they weren’t.

This conflicts with a statement by Tankovich’s attorney that Harris was present at meetings in
which Tankovich discussed the practice.

Harris had another chance to connect the dots in 2011, when she was told that irregularities in
student attendance records were interfering with truancy cases brought by the district. She alerted
Yost’s office that there could be a problem, but according to her testimony last week, she still
didn’t know that bogus student withdrawals caused the problem. Harris says now that principals
ordered into private meetings and instructed to make questionable changes to records should have
balked, or at least checked on whether the instructions were appropriate. “I’m a former high-school
principal,” she said in testimony. “Principals question things all the time.”

If only she had shown such diligence when the district’s data integrity was challenged.

The evidence to date strongly indicates that Harris knew or should have known what was going on.
If, as expected, more district staffers plead to charges and additional evidence is revealed, the
case is likely to grow stronger.